When I served as hazard mitigation consultant to the New Hampshire
Office of Emergency Management, we had a little riddle:

Question: What is the worst thing any emergency manager could
possibly do?
Answer: Create his or her own
intentional emergency!

Yet, that is exactly what Kevin Orr, the phony head emergency
manager in the bankrupt City of Detroit, did on September 11, 2013
-- by ordering power to the downtown district turned off with no
notice to people working or living there. And his avowed
reason for taking such a despicable action was that these same
people had not responded fast enough to his call for reduced power
usage -- so his action was to deny them any power at all. There,
that will teach them a lesson!

Lest anyone think I am making this story up -- and that it is
really a bizarre plot from a very bad movie, titled perhaps OUT OF
POWER -- here in italics is what has been noted definitively about
this matter on OpEdNews.com:

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If you ever had any doubt that Michigan has
been taken over by a group of dangerous, radical extremists, what
happened in Detroit on September 11 th , 2013 should be
enough to wake you up. There were several things significant about
September 11 th , 2013. Not only was it the anniversary
of the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center, but the state of
Michigan was also experiencing an unseasonal heat wave. In the city
of Detroit, power outages left people stranded in elevators ,
trapped four hours in the blistering heat. Hundreds were evacuated
from buildings in the downtown area, traffic lights did not
function, public transportation was disabled and 1,400 sites across
the city were without power. Wayne State University and other key
buildings still remained closed, the following day. All of this
after the city's power supply supposedly failed.

As if the event itself was not bad enough, several
spokespersons for what is left of the City of Detroit, Gary Brown
and Bill Nowling, actually smirked boastfully that the forced power
outages were intended to teach Detroiters a lesson -- Brown and
Nowling said that since folks had not responded rapidly enough to
demands that they curtail power usage during a record heat wave,
they had to be taught a lesson by the intentional cutoff of
essential electric power to their buildings. Yes, that is
essentially what they said, as hard to believe as it may be.

Let me see if I understand the logic of these actions:
when workers and residents are stuck in a bad situation
not of their making, emergency managers should make it worse by
creating an artificial crisis to teach them a lesson -- is that the
logic? What next? When people do not evacuate their
homes rapidly enough in the face of threats of forest fires, will
we order the fire fighters to burn down those same houses?
When the next Hurricane arrives and folks delay leaving their
homes and possessions behind as fast as some armchair emergency
manager thinks that they should, will we remove the sandbags
and cement walls and flood them on purpose?

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The ultimate responsibility for this particularly-harmful
brand of idiocy rests with the present Tea Party Governor of
Michigan, Rick Snyder, who deserves at least early impeachment for
this latest outrage, and so many others. Yes, the noble city
of Detroit, once the home of the world-renowned American auto
industry and the inspiration for that unique Motown music, has
fallen upon evil times, some of which are of its own making.
But to kick a person -- or a city -- when they are down is
despicable! For officials to do that kicking is truly
shameful!

Perhaps if it were Rick Snyder and his cronies who were
intentionally stuck in a powerless frozen elevator during a heat
wave, they might begin to understand their criminal misconduct.
Have we learned nothing from the Enron disaster, with its
artificial power cutbacks to force Californians to pay much higher
rates for electricity? Some Enron officials were in fact
sentenced to prison terms for that atrocious misconduct.
Public officials who engineer emergencies deserve more than
mere impeachment -- serving a long term in a prison with no power
might well be appropriate!

Author's Biography
Eugene Elander has been a progressive social and political activist for decades. As an author, he won the Young Poets Award at 16 from the Dayton Poets Guild for his poem, The Vision. He was chosen Poet Laureate of (more...)